Sitting beside a suffering, hyperventilating zebra (really a horse with stripes) was not new to the women in my family. My mother had experienced it, as had my grandmother and my grandmother’s grandmother. Now it was my turn
“For every pot there is a lid,” my mother said before she died. Nobody knew why she said it or why only females cried.
Here it was again, a life and death moment in the animal kingdom calling for human compassion. In many ways this experience would be no different than fishing for compliments from a bored husband on weekends.
The first time is always the hardest. I could not stop taking pictures with my i‑phone of the baby fake-horse — sloshing around as though playing in a small heart-shaped plastic pool. Lazy. There she was: bold stripes facing up, stripes underlining her upturned nose — too adorable for most people’s tastes. A fake horse like her mother at best.
I prepared my fists, two of them… rolling up my lacy sleeves and folded fingers ready for emergency triage, the kind needed for the birth of camels, rhinos, zebras (horses with stripes), gazelles, others of similar dimension and need.
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Meg Pokrass. For one of my five bosses.